“I’m sorry.” I want there to be something else to say. But anything more would be a lie and I know what those feel like. Jasper deserves better.

“Maybe she’s got a point.”

“So you’re thinking of playing after all?” I sound too hopeful. I can’t help it. I don’t like Jasper’s mother, but I agree that he should go to Boston College and play hockey. He’s too lost right now to cut himself free from the one thing that still brings him joy.

“No way,” he says, like that’s the most absurd suggestion ever. “I’m definitely not playing.”

My heart has picked up speed. Yes, there is a line between me reading Jasper’s bad feelings and me being anxious, but it is still super blurry. All I can say for sure is that this conversation is making me really worried.

Whether that’s because of my feelings or Jasper’s feelings is still up for debate.

“SO I MADE it to your actual office,” I said to Dr. Shepard in our first face-to-face meeting a week after the camp. I was fishing for praise. All that trauma and there I was, getting myself out of the house.

She nodded at me and almost smiled, looking as pretty and petite as she always did in her big red chair. Still like Alice in Wonderland shrunk down to nothing. I was relieved that hadn’t changed.

“I’m glad you’re here,” Dr. Shepard said.

It wasn’t exactly the job-well-done parade I was hoping for. But that was Dr. Shepard’s style: don’t make too much out of anything. Not the good or the bad. She wanted me to have expectations for myself, but she wanted to be sure I knew she didn’t have any of her own.

We chatted then for a while: how was I spending my days, how were things at home? But there was only so much dancing around what had happened at the camp that we could do.

“You know, I felt less anxious while I was going after Cassie,” I said, finally diving into the middle, probably a little too aggressively. “Shouldn’t that have made me more anxious? I was having a hard time leaving the house. Wasn’t leaving the house actually.”

“Anxiety is variable, Wylie. No two people manifest it in exactly the same way. There are no ‘shoulds.’ Even for one person anxiety can change over time depending on life events—your mother’s accident certainly made your anxiety worse to the point that you were unable to go outside for a brief period. The adrenaline of being called upon to help Cassie likely camouflaged your own anxiety temporarily,” she said. “For once the alarm bells going off inside you matched the actual danger of your situation. It’s not surprising that your anxiety would be less noticeable.”